to march to Paris (then an open city), and let Napoleon do his worst to their communications. Actually this was exactly what he was preparing to do. He had determined to move eastward to St Dizier, rally what garrisons he could find, and raise the whole country against the invaders, and had actually started on the execution of this plan when his instructions fell into the enemy’s hands and his projects were exposed. Regardless of the threat, the allies marched straight for the capital. Marmont and Mortier with what troops they could rally took up a position on Montmartre heights to oppose them, but seeing further resistance to be hopeless they gave way on the 31st of March, just as Napoleon, with the wreck of the Guards and a mere handful of other detachments, was hurrying across the rear of the Austrians towards Fontainebleau to join them.
This was the end of the First Empire. The story of the Waterloo Campaign is told under its own heading.
The Military Character of Napoleon.
No military career has been examined more often and more freely than that of Napoleon. Yet even so the want of complete documentary evidence upon which to base conclusions has vitiated all but the most recent of the countless monographs and histories that have appeared on the subject. Fortunately the industry and ability of the military history section of the French General Staff have rendered available, by the publication of the original orders issued during the course of his campaigns, a mass of information which, taken in conjunction with his own voluminous correspondence, renders it possible to trace the growth of his military genius with a reasonable approach to accuracy. Formerly we could only watch the evolution of his powers of organization and the purely psychic gifts of resolution and command. The actual working of his mind towards that strategic and tactical ascendancy that rendered his presence on the battlefield, according to the testimony of his opponents, equal to a reinforcement of 40,000 men, was entirely undiscernible.
The history of his youth reveals no special predilection for the military service—the bent of his mind was political far more than military, but unlike the politicians of his epoch he consistently applied scientific and mathematical methods to his theories, and desired above all things a knowledge of facts in their true relation to one another. His early military education was the best and most practical then attainable, primarily because he had the good fortune to come under the influence of men of exceptional ability—Baron du Keile, Bois Roger and others. From them he derived a sound knowledge of artillery and fortification, and particularly of mountain warfare, which latter was destined to prove of inestimable service to him in his first campaigns of 1794–95 and 1796. In these, as well as in his most dramatic success of Marengo in 1800, we can discern no trace of strategical innovation. He was simply a master of the methods of his time. Ceaseless industry, energy and conspicuous personal gallantry were the principal factors of his brilliant victories, and even in 1805 at Ulm and Austerlitz it was still the excellence of the tactical instrument, the army, which the Revolution had bequeathed to him that essentially produced the results.
Meanwhile the mathematical mind, with its craving for accurate data on which to found its plans (the most difficult of all to obtain under the conditions of warfare), had been searching for expedients which might serve him to better purpose, and in 1805 he had recourse to the cavalry screen in the hope of such results. This proved a palliation of his difficulty, but not a solution. Cavalry can only observe, it cannot hold. The facts as to the position of an opponent accurately observed and correctly reported at a given moment, afford no reliable guarantee of his position 48 hours later, when the orders based on this information enter upon execution. This can only be calculated on the ground of reasonable probability as to what it may be to the best interest of the adversary to attempt. But what may seem to a Napoleon the best course is not necessarily the one that suggests itself to a mediocre mind, and the greater the gulf which separates the two minds the greater the uncertainty which must prevail on the side of the abler commander.
It was in 1806 that an improved solution was first devised. The general advanced guard of all arms now followed immediately behind the cavalry screen and held the enemy in position, while the remainder of the army followed at a day’s march in a “bataillon carrée” ready to manœuvre in any required direction. The full reach of this discovery seems as yet scarcely to have impressed itself upon the emperor with complete conviction, for in the succeeding campaign in Poland we find that he twice departed from this forma—at Pultusk and Heilsberg—and each time his enemy succeeded in escaping him. At Friedland, however, his success was complete, and henceforth the method recurs on practically every battlefield. When it fails it is because its inventor himself hesitates to push his own conception to its full development (Eckmühl 1809, Borodino 1812). Yet it would seem that this invention of Napoleon’s was intuitive rather than reasoned; he never communicated it in its entirety to his marshals, and seems to have been only capable of exercising it either when in full possession of his health or under the excitement of action. Thus we find him after the battle of Dresden—itself a splendid example of its efficacy—suddenly reverting to the terminology of the school in which he had been brought up, which he himself had destroyed, only to revive again in the next few days and handle his forces strategically with all his accustomed brilliancy.
In 1814 and in 1815 in the presence of the enemy he again rises supremely to each occasion, only to lapse in the intervals even below the level of his old opponents; and that this was not the consequence of temporary depression naturally resulting from the accumulated load of his misfortunes, is sufficiently shown by the downright puerility of the arguments by which he seeks to justify his own successes in the St Helena memoirs, which one may search in vain for any indication that Napoleon was himself aware of the magnitude of his own discovery. One is forced to the conclusion that there existed in Napoleon’s brain a dual capacity—one the normal and reasoning one, developing only the ideas and conceptions of his contemporaries, the other intuitive, and capable only of work under abnormal pressure. At such moments of crisis it almost excelled human comprehension; the mind seems to have gathered to itself and summed up the balance of all human passions arranged for and against him, and to have calculated with unerring exactitude the consequences of each decision.
A partial explanation of this phenomenon may perhaps be found in the economy of nervous energy his strategical method ensured to him. Marching always ready to fight wherever his enemy might stand or move to meet him, his mind was relieved from all the hesitations which necessarily arise in men less confident in the security of their designs. Hence, when on the battlefield the changing course of events left his antagonists mentally exhausted, he was able to face them with will power neither bound nor broken. But this only explains a portion of the mystery that surrounds him, and which will make the study of his career the most fascinating to the military student of all times.
Amongst all the great captains of history Cromwell alone can be compared to him. Both, in their powers of organization and the mastery of the tactical potentialities of the weapons of their day, were immeasurably ahead of their times, and both also understood to the full the strategic art of binding and restraining the independent will power of their opponents, an art of which Marlborough and Frederick, Wellington, Lee and Moltke do not seem ever even to have grasped the fringe. (F. N. M.)
Bibliography.—Among the principal modern works on Napoleon’s campaigns 1805–14 are the following: Yorck von Wartenberg, Napoleon als Feldherr (1866, English and French translations); H. Camon, La Guerre napoléonienne (Paris, 1903); H. Bonnal, Esprit de la guerre moderne (a series of works, of which those dealing with 1805–1812 are separately mentioned below). For 1805 see Alombert and Colin (French Gen. Staff), Campagne de 1805 en Allemagne (Paris, 1898–1910); H. Bonnal, De Rosbach à Ulm (Paris,
